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Some media outlets (such as C|Net in this story:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7412848.html) paint the argument against
standards that rely upon patents as an ideological battle, with no pragmatic
importance.
This could not be further from the truth.
Use of standard communication protocols should not be subject to fees! This
would hamper electronic communication and eventually make standards-compliant
products such as apache and linux illegal (At least in their fully-functional
forms).
This open source software has dramatically lowered costs in many industries,
and has contributed to recent economic growth. If you increase the cost of
operations for businesses involved in telecommunications, you greatly hamper
their ability to compete in the market.
Even with reasonable fees for these patents, you will force law-abiding
companies to move to expensive, proprietary, and sometimes un-maintainable
systems, which will cause more damage than the actual patent charges ever
could.
If you must charge for the usage of basic internet protocols, I suggest that
you mandate that the price of a patent liscence be proportional to the
Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price of the software system. This would
allow independent programmers to develop software for internal use without
fear of legal repercussion, and also allow the open-source movement to
continue to contribute to the usefulness of W3C compliant protocols.
If you don't, I can only see two results from this proposal:
1) Development of communications infrastructure will be pushed into areas
without patent enforcement, in the same way that encryption and security
software projects have begun to move outside of the US. At that point, users
will simply download the software from overseas sites, or base their
operations in areas with more advantagous laws.
or
2) Patent-free / patent-bypassing alternatives to your protocols will be
developed, hampering communication between various organizations, and
undermining the authority of the W3C, and eventaully making these
royalty-based proposals irrelevant, and causing numerous compatibility
nightmares.
You can argue about how wide-spread these effects will be, but I don't think
you can honestly deny that this sort of thing will happen.
Personally, I would rather see the internet to continue to "just work."
- -Russell Sears
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